A bit off color

...but I can't resist. So I'm not accused of pirating that image, if you think it's funny, please check out the artist's website. No, it wasn't done by The Artist.

Lightning Bolt!

We've been talking about Michael Phelps non-stop of late, which is understandable given how amazing his 8 gold medals are. But I've never seen an individual performance like Usain Bolt had tonight (well last night, thanks again NBC) in the 100 meter finals.

Bolt didn't just win and set the world record, he started celebrating with 15 or 20 meters to go and still crushed the competition! My jaw just dropped when he put his hands down and started easing up. He won by 0.2 seconds, which in the 100 meters is an insane amount of time. The announcers tonight were saying that his pre-finish celebration probably cost him 0.1 seconds. Can you imagine what it would have looked like if he had run all the way through to the finish? I don't think there's ever been a race of that caliber that was dominated so thoroughly. Michael Phelps would have had to win the 400 IM by about half the pool to equal what Usain Bolt did tonight.

He said after the race that he didn't care about the time because he already had the world record and just wanted to win the gold medal. Ordinarily I would applaud that sentiment, but tonight I felt gypped. I saw the best 100 meter run ever and the athlete wasn't even trying his hardest!

His attitude makes me wonder if there's more to it than just trying to win the gold medal. Was he playing a psychological game with his opponents, saying "I set the world record without really trying...you'll never beat me."? Was there some financial incentive? Perhaps a sponsor has promised him bonuses every time he breaks the world record and he wanted to leave himself some room to improve. Or the last possibility, the one that I hate to bring up, but is on my (and presumably your) mind every time an athlete does something spectacular now:"Was he cheating?" I'm wondering if he figured that if he'd done a 9.59 he would raise more suspicions about drug use?

I hope I'm wrong. I hope there were no ulterior motives, that he simply was so excited (and confident) that he couldn't hold it in until after the race. But sadly, the state of today's sporting world has caused me to look at everything a little more cynically. So please don't let me down, Michael.

Eating like a champ

I generally have a cup of tea and a bowl or two of cereal (Cheerios with blueberries is the current choice) to get me going in the morning. Michael Phelps, on the other hand, downs three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise...

...PLUS one five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar, three chocolate-chip pancakes, and two two cups of coffee. And he's only just getting started for the day.

Phelps consumes far more calories in one meal (4,000) than most of us do in three. That adds up to A LOT of calories in one day. Not surprising when you consider the intensity and length of his daily workout regimen, but just thinking about consuming 12,000 calories in a day--regardless of exercise routine--is mind-boggling. Here the rest of an average day of eats for Phelps, courtesy of a recent post in the Wall Street Journal blog:

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

Can't an all-time great Olympian get some dessert?

Greatest of All Time?

No, I'm not talking about Michael Phelps. I'm talking about Brad Ziegler. Unless you're a huge A's fan or involved in a deep fantasy baseball league, you probably have no idea who Brad Ziegler is. But he might be the greatest baseball pitcher of all time.

Huh?

Ziegler is a 28 year old rookie relief pitcher. He has now pitched 38 innings in the majors and has yet to give up a run, breaking the major league record of 25 innings without allowing a run at the start of a career. What is more, he has yet to even give up an extra base hit! That's right opposing batters are hitting 0.179 against him with a 0.179 slugging percentage.

His story is pretty interesting. He was drafted om 2003 after his senior season of college, but was released by the Phillies after throwing just 6 innings in the minors. He signed with an independent league team but soon thereafter was signed by the A's. After a few decent seasons in the minors as a starter, the A's decided he was unlikely to make the majors as a starter and asked him to changing his pitching style to throw sidearm. So between the 2006 and 2007 learned to throw sidearm and became a relief pitcher. Since then, he has thrown more than 130 innings in the majors and minors without giving up a home run. So far this season, including the minors, he has only given up 1 run, and thanks to a series of disastrous relief appearances by Huston Street, Ziegler is now the A's closer.

Apparently his pitching style is so deceptive and has so much break that hitters just can't hit the ball in the air. He doesn't strike out many guys, but all hitters can do is hit weak ground balls against him. So far in the majors he has gotten the hitter to hit into a double play about half the time that there has been a runner on first with less than two outs. That may or not not sound like a lot to you, but the all time record for a whole season is only about 35%, so he's inducing GIDPs way more than any player in history.

It is unlikely that he'll be able to continue allowing no runs, but it sure is fun to see a guy with (apparently) middling skills pitch like an all time great. I'll be very interested to see if he can sustain his success, and if so, if it will spur a whole generation of guys who can't through 90 miles an hour to try throwing sidearm.

Golds Galore

It seems only fitting to celebrate Michael Phelps becoming the "winningest" Olympic athlete by remembering one of the now second-winningest Olympic athletes, albeit in one of his less than shining moments:


Ohhhhhhhhhh, ohhh-oh-ohhh-oh-ohhh-oh, oh-ohhhhhhh that's bad. So bad it's good, actually, and made even better by former ESPN anchor Charlie Steiner's memorable "written by Francis Scott off-Key" line, uttered while in the midst of one of his patented fits of laughter. Steiner was a personal favorite back in the day before SportsCenter became ObnoxiousAndAnnoyingAndWayTooLoudEntertainmentCenter.

But I digress...congrats, Mr. Phelps!

Thanks NBC

I apologize in advance for writing a rant rather than an informative post, but I just need to vent.

NBC spent tons of time and presumably tons of money negotiating with the Chinese Olympic committee to get them to have things like the swimming and gymnastics finals in the morning so they could show them live in prime time in the United States. But they're only showing it live in HALF the United States. I ask you, what is the point of going through the trouble to make sure it's live when it's not live everywhere?

For the second night in a row, Michael Phelps swam after 10:00 PM eastern time. I live in Arizona, right now we're three hours behind the east coast*. Why couldn't I see Michael Phelps swim at 7:15 PM my time? That's still prime time. I'd come home early from work if I had to to see him swim if it was earlier! But instead, I get it on a 2 hour delay. And then they have the gall to leave the "LIVE" logo up on the screen as if I really am seeing it in real time.

NBC is holding me hostage. They offer something like 2600 hours of Olympic broadcasting streaming online. But if you investigate, it's only sports that aren't on TV. Want to watch swimming? You'll have to wait for it to be on TV. However, they don't show all the swimming events on TV (like the first semifinal of the 200 fly tonight), but because swimming is a TV sport, you can't even see the events they aren't showing on TV!

So my only choice is to wait 2 hours, which means that I can't turn on my computer because the lead story basically everywhere on the internet is what happened to Michael Phelps. To make matters worse, my wife is currently in Maryland and the Artist is in St. Louis. I talked to both of them last night on the phone, and both of them had wanted to talk about the 4x100 free relay. Both of them had seen it in real time, but couldn't talk about it with me because I had to wait my allotted 2 hours. Grrrr!

I understand NBC is doing this to sell prime time advertising, but it seems like they're doing nothing but angering people who are really excited about seeing their product. I talked with 2 people at work today. They are both huge sports fans, and both are thoroughly disgusted with NBC over this. So I ask NBC, is angering 100% of your customers west of Kansas worth the extra advertising revenue?


*Arizona is wacky. We don't have day light saving time, so right now I'm 3 hours behind the east coast, but in the winter I will only be 2 hours behind. To make matters worse, some Indian reservations use day light savings time, and some don't. So there are pockets of Arizona which are always 2 hours behind. And to add insult to injury www.nbcolympics.com knows that I'm in Arizona, and tells me the times for the programs are 3 hours behind the east coast, but then they come on TV 2 hours behind. So if was relying on NBC to tell me when to watch Michael Phelps, I'd still miss it! Not to mention the fact that if I happened to look at the website before it was aired here to find out when it was airing, they would have told me the results before I could get to the TV schedule!

"Eat, sleep, and swim!"

Given my interest in all things sport, my viewing of the 2008 Summer Olympics thus far has been sporadic and lazy, mostly because I just wasn't that excited about the Summer Games. The reasons for my lack of enthusiasm are multifaceted and range from the impact that globalism has had on my view of nationalism/patriotism to the fact that I tend to be a bit of a contrarian in the face of something carrying mass appeal and thus can often be a sourpuss and overall lame-o. That said, however, I now find myself totally into the Beijing Olympics.

And why? One guy: Michael Phelps. But not because I was rooting for him. I was actually rooting against Phelps as he swam in the 400 IM finals tonight. "Ah ha," I thought, "prime time...NBC...first night of the Olympics...now is the perfect time for Phelps' demise!" It's not that I had anything against him per se; I was just getting tired of the bombardment of hype and media coverage and endorsement spots surrounding his seemingly inevitable quest to break Mark Spitz' record for gold medals won in a single Olympic Games (seven). Plus, it was almost a more interesting story to me if Phelps were to somehow not break the record, given that his doing so was a foregone conclusion.

Well, my cantankerousness has been shed like water off a breaststrokers back and now I'm rooting for Phelps all the way. And how could I not? It's impossible to root against a guy so genuinely human and unpretentious. Granted, not that you can really know someone all that well from a brief pre-race story and post-race interview, but I was shocked to see and hear that Phelps was most unlike who I thought he'd be, namely some combination of the following:

1) Arrogant (in the stereotypical obnoxious American kind of way)
2) Corporate/scripted/personality-less (think: A-Rod)
3) Annoying with a kind of cool "I'm better than you and, yeah, I know it" air about him (like the person who acts as if they have something they don't actually possess and/or have yet to in fact earn)

...but he wasn't any of the three, which was as refreshing as it was surprising.

Reluctant as I was to really get into these Olympic games, I'm hooked. I'll admit it. The Olympic spirit has got a hold of me, and thanks to an athlete I least thought I'd root for.

Much more to come after Team USA faces off against China on the hardwood!